Company of Heroes on PC.... one of the best RTS games ever?

As far as games in an overall sense are concerned, I think that RTS games are probably my favorite especially in modern times where bit studios are focusing more on graphics than on actual gameplay.

A fantastic example of this improved graphics but seriously diminished gameplay would be Final Fantasy XVI, which I wrote a lengthy grip post about yesterday.

There was a time though, back when I was still gaming on PC that RTS games were seriously the best in my mind. I could play them endlessly and the online sessions that I used to have with family and a few friends were some of the best gaming situations I have ever had.

Company of Heroes was a game that really set itself apart because unlike most other RTS games I had played, there wasn't a need to establish certain resource gathering structures because in a battlefield, there aren't many resources that you can actually gather now, is there?

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Unlike other popular RTS games that I had played such as Starcraft and Warcraft among others, it wasn't possible to sit back and amass a huge force and then overwhelm the enemy based on time and impenetrable defenses - which was a common tactic that I used in PvE matches on both of the "craft" games.

In COH, you had to be a lot more tactical with what sometimes quite limited resources you had and capturing of various points was what controlled your ability to produce new units. So if you sat back and just defended a couple of these, you would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by an enemy that was busy capturing these points.

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While many of these areas didn't seem particularly relevant strategically, the "victory points" that you get from controlling them is the entire point of most of the levels. If you control a certain amount of them and deny them to your enemy, their total number of victory points will decrease. In many of the maps your ability to win the stage is based upon who runs out of victory points first. Therefore, you must always be on the move in both defending a position that you took over as well as taking over new ones. You will be alerted on the map when certain points have been taken over, and you have to make a strategic choice: Do you abandon the ones you already control to take over more, or do you focus on reinforcing the positions you already control.

There is also the very real factor, especially when playing against another human, that their rapid takeover of a particular area could be a trick to lure you out into the open or into a minefield that they established while you were not looking.

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I found this to be quite refreshing although at first, i will admit, I hated not gathering resources and just being able to wait it out the way that I had done in both of the "craft" games I played prior to this one.

Some pretty cool ideas were in this game as well such as the ability to post a sniper in a building near a captured point that would snipe infantry and not even really let them know where it was coming from. This would prevent the capturing of certain points that are not of huge importance because the sniper, although a bit of a sitting duck when faced with armor, was really effective at keeping points against small attacks and would also give you a line of sight as far as what number of units the enemy invasion consists of. Much like I am sure many actual snipers were used for in real combat situations, these guys were kind of expected to die frequently. I know mine did.

One downside of the sniper in PvE was that the computer appeared to cheat and be able to know his location immediately, sometimes before you even fire and that was cheese. human opponents though, that was an entirely different kettle of fish.

Getting armor involved was a lot of fun because you could normally overwhelm almost any enemy area with these as long as there was a straight way in. Also, unlike in Starcraft where you just tear through 10 siege tanks, lose them, then rebuild them, losing a tank in Company of Heroes could mean the difference between being able to win or badly losing a level. I feel as though this was a bit more realistic display of actual combat, even if the pace was a lot slower than the rather crazy battles involving multiple huge groups of units in any other RTS game I had played up to this point.

Other interesting aspects of combat included positioning of a tank since in real life, the majority of the armor is on the front of the vehicle. If your tank was positioned poorly and got hit by another large round, it would cause substantially more damage. I don't recall this ever being a factor in any other game I had played. It was frustrating at times because the movement of the vehicle was very slow, just like an actual tank would have been during WW2.

While this game was a lot slower paced than other RTS games that I played, I thoroughly enjoyed it after I kind of got the hang of it. I ended up defeating the main quest but never got into any of the many add-ons that the game offered later.

This was back in my PC gaming days but I abandoned playing like that about 6 years ago because I got tired of the cost associated with constantly upgrading my PC. These days I am a console gamer exclusively but this upsets me at times because RTS games, when they even exist, are basically unplayable with a controller. You NEED a mouse and keyboard to play this.

The original Company of Heroes - which is the only one I have ever played, is available on Steam for a mere $4. I still can't buy it or wouldn't try because I am a Linux user now and not a very good one at that. If you do have a PC though, I think this could be perhaps the best $4 you could spend on gaming.